A website devoted to exploring accessibility at the intersection of technology and rhetoric. What began in 2008 as a space to explore accessible podcasting has turned into an ongoing reflection on the rhetoric of closed captioning. I welcome your feedback.

Over the last ten days, the percentage of full episodes and movies with closed captions on Hulu has actually gone down. Overall, that percentage of cc content is embarrassingly low, hovering at around 4.5% for full episodes and 6.5% for movies — and appears to be on the way down.

The videos on this site are transformative works used in good faith, in keeping with Section 107 of U.S. copyright law, and as such constitute fair use of copyrighted material. According to Section 107 of U.S. copyright law, “the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or...

In this example, the caption user recognizes a heartbeat before the non-caption user that because the bad guy's captioned sentence is unfinished ("We can nego-"), he will be shot before he can finish saying "negotiate."

Every feature-length movie distributed over the Internet needs to be closed captioned. That goes without saying. But there's a special category of movie -- the low-budget cheesy feature -- that may be inaccessible to all viewers if the movie's production values are not sufficiently high.

Closed captions, when done well, provide access to dialogue and other important sounds for those who need them. But captions have the potential to do much more. Captions can make visible those layers of meaning that may not be readily available on the uncaptioned surface of things.